Do we as readers subconsciously make these “corrections”? How far can they go? One of the things that always surprises me when talking about Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is how little attention is given to the fact that this novel presents the suicide of one of its characters as a gift of individual to collective, on a par with, or at least comparable to, the party that Mrs. Dalloway throws for her well-to-do friends, or indeed the writing of the book itself. These are not fashionable or “safe” thoughts. At the crucial moment, when Septimus Warren Smith, feeling threatened by another doctor’s visit, throws himself from the window onto the railings below, he yells “I’ll give it to you!” The Italian translation offers, “Lo volete voi,” which in English literally is “It’s you who want it!” or, more idiomatically, “You asked for it!” Was the translator aware she had altered the text?

She took the microphone and said she was “surprised, shocked and distressed” that, having come to speak out about the treatment of Rushdie, she now needed to defend Cosaw. “I think that it is very surprising to me that my friend and colleague John Coetzee, without really discussing it with me or anyone in Cosaw, has sprung this public attack upon us. But that is a democratic right and that is what we are here to defend.”

Remembering the confrontation between Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee over the Salman Rushdie incident in South Africa. [via The Guardian]